I've recently come back from the game and I have a level 51 warrior. I'd like to be able to dual wield dps on him, but at this point is that the way to go? I don't want to play a monk or rogue, and berserker doesn't offer dual wielding.
Are you looking to tank or dps? If you just want to dps and dual wield, try a ranger. If you want to tank, then dual wielding wont be used as often as it sounds like you want, it can be used, but on cutting edge you will have to use sword and board.
I don't want to discourage you but a War is not a DPS class, and never will be with current design. If you want to dps, then look at another class, a war is Tank first, dps second. War come in at around 1/4 the dps of dps classes on average of what I have seen when they are in dps mode, when in tank mode they are around 1/10th.
Dps is all a matter of perspective, as long as you turn on attack you're doing damage per second; the scale of what you will be able to do as a warrior vs any other class is the question. If you're having fun doing it, then best of luck with your choice.
Recent changes have been made to improve the viability of Dual Wield for DPS and tanking. Generally speaking, after lvl 85 our Two-Handers are best for most damage applications, while 1H and Shield offer the best defense. Prior to that, Dual Wield is the Warrior default stance for agro and DPS purposes. At 85 this becomes somewhat more complicated with (Improved) Shield Specialist and various Proficiencies, aka "stances", listed here. http://lucy.allakhazam.com/spelllist.html?searchtext=proficiency Keep in mind these are fairly fresh abilities, so there are still some tuning and quirks to sort out.
Itwerewolf, Please don't be discouraged about your ability to DPS. Everquest has always been a game about trade-offs in general. It's one of the things I love most about this game. You can't be the best at tanking, at healing, and and DPS'ing. Every benefit we receive has a downside in another area. We are specialized, as we have always been, in the realm of taking hits to the face. The recent changes and the implementation of stances have made us much more viable as a dps class - to the point that we can replace a mercenary without much difficulty and pull superior numbers. With that said, these stances have negative impacts to our ability to survive. We will never pull even a fraction of what a pure dps class can, but at least at this point we can provide enough to fill a dps spot over a mercenary if that is the role we choose to play. With that said, please don't be discouraged that no matter what you do, you'll never be able to sustain high damage numbers as a dps class would. Things have improved for us, but the game by design has placed us in certain roles that we will never break free of. No matter how much 'dps' gear you acquire, you will never be able to compete with a dps class. Best of luck and welcome back. If your goal is to be the very best dps warrior this game has ever seen, who am I to discourage that? We all play for something, and if that's your goal, pursue it. Just realize that there will always be limitations from allowing you to reach the numbers that actual DPS classes can reach.
It was more the desire to dps instead of, not as well as, tank. Since that's not really doable it seems warrior isn't what I'm looking for anymore.
On paper it's "doable" to do some dps as a warrior, but in practice it doesn't really work out. You're probably going to be in group as the only tank, your dps stuff locks you out of tanking abilities. In a raid setting, you're not going to have the ADPS classes with you to compete. Even when we can DPS, it's not very fun (imo) and just kinda hollow and shallow altogether. Using your burns and hitting Shield topple every 10(?)seconds is just really lame and unfun. All that being said, warrior has a ton of things to offer and you'll learn a lot about the game being one. Good luck on whatever you choose!
In eq, the more focused a class is on its task, the worse it is at others - general tasks being tanking, dps, and healing. Since warriors are the best tanks, they are terrible dps. If they were average dps - there would be no advantage to being a 2nd or 3rd teir dps class, as warriors would have WAY more defense than you but compete with you for dps.
Last night I ran the daily HAs with a Paladin tanking instead, so I was in DPS mode. I am CotF T1 raid geared with raid weapons. I only had self buffs running, using the 2Handed Proficiency and Offensive Discipline, hitting Battle Leap/Knee Strike/Shield Topple whenever they came off cooldown. I saved Vehement Rage/Second Spire/War Sheol's Heroic Blade for named fights, and held Rampage for multi-pulls of at least three mobs. I averaged 25K DPS per mission, which is about the same as a wizard merc set to Burn. That's what you can currently expect for Warrior damage: you are capable of wizard merc DPS (with better ability to follow the Main Assist) while ready to step in as backup tank if necessary.
Warriors can contribute to dps nicely, at least at level 105 max AA's. Not sure how it will go leveling up. My warrior just finished a 6 HA session with 200 mobs killed. Average dps while tanking for all was 15030. (Group geared, there is a bard in the group.) It was also 15.65% of all damage done. The wizard and berserker doubled that amount each, but still was a nice contribution.
From my parsing, there is a significant DPS difference between 30 delay and 35 delay 2H weapons with similar ratios, so that may explain the varying results. The 30 delay being the better. The problem with stances is that our disced DPS still sucks. Here's what I find funny. If I do the shield cheesing with heroic blade + full discs on a trash mob I can do 150k DPS on 1 10-15s fight, with the majority of that DPS coming from the heroic blade strike. That's about 1/3 what a zerker can do in that duration, and about 1/2 what they can do in a ~45s fight. So even if we cheese a broken AA, we can't get remotely in the realm of zerkers, when 4 years ago we could regularly do 1/2+ the DPS of a zerker regardless of fight duration.... and do that while taking a minimal hit to our tankability and reuse timers.
